GamerEscape

Sometimes, it’s hard for me to know which parts of a game that don’t totally land in a preview are a result of the game still being in an early state and which parts are just conceptual issues. There are a lot of games that go into early access when they are more or less in a launch state, and then there are games that go into early access with huge chunks of the game still missing. Nor does one or the other necessarily mean that the finished game will be better or worse, as Baldur’s Gate 3 demonstrated.

Overthrown is obviously not that game. (Nor is it trying to be.) But there was definitely a sense of finding myself wondering if I was just missing a good chunk of the game because it’s early access or if the game was just flubbing certain components. And I am honestly still not completely sure, but I am at a point when I need to talk about the game that I played… which, I have to admit, did not exactly compel me as much as I was hoping.

Just Going to Throw This Out

So at least right now, while there is a story summary on the game’s page on Steam, there is not really any story in the game itself. You are plopped into a field and told to pick up your crown, and then you start making your town. What are you doing? Why is this a thing you have to do? No idea. In fact, as of this point the game rather crucially lacks any sort of narrative, explanation, or even tutorial for most of what you’re doing. I am betting this is mostly a result of early access, but it definitely doesn’t make the best first impression for the game even in this early state.

Still, if you’ve played video games before you can piece together the broad strokes from context. You are in charge of building a town, starting with the town hall and then moving on to dwellings. You also need to manage resources like lumber, food for your citizens, metal, and so forth. Placing down facilities automatically spawns more people to staff them, but each feeding locale and house can only hold so many people.

Also you need outhouses that generate fertilizer, which are tracked while actual seeds are not. That’s… a choice.

The other big twist, as suggested somewhat by the name, is that you can pick up and throw almost everything. Want to reposition a building? Pick it up and throw it. Need lumber faster than your lumberjacks are gathering it? Pick up a tree and throw it into the sawmill. Want to throw citizens around? You get the idea. Picking up and throwing things is a pretty universal element. You can also theoretically do it to the bandits that will dot the landscape and come to attack your settlement on a regular basis.

Unfortunately, the “throw things” element is… well, kinda not important, or at least I didn’t find it too important. It helped early on for gathering trees and throwing them into the sawmill, for example, but it wasn’t long before that wasn’t a going concern. I definitely never needed it for combat, which was a very straightforward and docile sort of hack-and-slash experience that never had me feeling like I was in any danger. And it was nice for repositioning buildings to theoretically make my settlement nicer, but… therein lies a bigger problem.

In most games of this style, players are constantly stuck between two tensions. A smaller settlement has fewer people to manage and fewer problems to deal with, but it also is in various ways difficult or impossible to make truly self-sustaining. As you expand to solve some of these problems, other problems emerge from your increased scale. Those problems scale in a non-linear fashion, and that gives you a constant pressure to keep expanding and keep managing.

In Overthrown, at least at this state, the main external pressure seems to be from the bandits… and those can be easily dealt with by the player without much risk. That means you have no real need to keep expanding or even much drive to manage. I never felt like I was working toward something; at most, I was just making new things and expanding because I had to do something and that was the obvious thing to do. It didn’t make me dislike the game, and it didn’t inherently make the game bad, but it felt like some part of the play loop was missing. It was thus hollow as an experience. No pressure to expand, no goals to work toward, just a list of chores.

Plastic Throwing Darts

One thing you can’t say about the game is that it’s not attractive. The blocky and cartoonish models combined with the hard-edged grid-based world seem like an odd combination, but they do generally work; it feels very abstractly video-game-y, but not in a negative fashion. And everything is animated very well, from the NPCs milling about the town you build to the wildlife you encounter, your own hops and bops around the world as well.

One thing that definitely struck me was that the game has some insanely long load times, which might be a result of the game still being in early access; things probably haven’t been fully optimized yet, which is fine, but it does get annoying. The game also does have the occasional moment of chugging, though I only noticed it happening intermittently when I played.

Music is… eh, it’s bland ambience. None of that or the sounds are bad, but the audio landscape felt intensely generic. This was a bit grating to me, probably mostly because the game already felt like it lacked much in terms of compelling gameplay; your mileage may vary.

Thrown Gauntlet

I don’t want to say that Overthrown is a bad game, especially since this is a preview and there’s a far more obvious explanation inherent in that. This is an unfinished game, still expanding and filling out its core play loop, and as a result some parts just aren’t here yet however much they might seem odd in their absence. Compared to games that I’ve found actively unpleasant to play, this game was just… boring.

But the thing is that these sorts of building sim games are already by their very nature a bit boring. That is theoretically a strength of the genre, that you can just let yourself sort of drift as you build things up and don’t focus too much attention on the moment-to-moment gameplay. Here it felt like if I stopped playing the game would just run fine without me being present, and… not to put too fine a point on it, but “I can stop playing and nothing would change” is probably not where you want a player to end up.

I think Overthrown could develop into a fine enough game, or even a good one. But the game where it is now is just bland. Not bad, but also without a core element that makes me feel inspired to play more. And that alone is a pretty big problem.

Preview copy provided by Maximum Entertainment for purposes of evaluation. All screenshots courtesy of Maximum Entertainment.